“Politicians are like bad horsemen, so preoccupied with staying in the saddle that they can’t bother about where they’re going.” — Joseph Schumpeter

What is The Horseman?

The Horseman is an online publication about frontier technology and the American government. Through opinion pieces, longform essays, explainers, interviews, and more, we seek to understand how U.S. policymakers and other government officials think about technology, and how they might shape it.

Why The Horseman?

Artificial intelligence has the potential to be transformative. Highly-intelligent, autonomous agents could automate away the drudgery of 21st century white collar work, giving rise to unprecedented productivity gains and economic growth. They could also replace the need for human labor entirely, wiping out the jobs of millions. Deep learning models could accelerate drug discovery, produce cures for the incurable, leading to a golden age of health care—or they could also help malicious actors to develop new, deadly pathogens, and heighten the risk of engineered pandemics.

Neither outcome is set in stone. Both the risks and rewards of A.I. alike will be shaped, if not determined altogether, by decisions taken and choices made across all branches of American government. While the entrepreneurial impulse and lofty ambitions of Silicon Valley’s leading lights—moving fast, breaking things, and building God—appear difficult to restrain, the American state, with its vast reach and breathtaking spending capacity, may still have the final say in the development of superhuman machine intelligence.

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